Over 100 Riot Games Employees Walked Out to End Forced Arbitration
vice.com
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The goal of civil court is to enforce contracts. If both parties agree via a contract to solve any disagreements with 3rd party arbitration, why wouldn't that be legal?
It's almost as if collective bargaining actually works. Why is tech one of the few sectors with no real unions?
Sometimes I hear "It doesn't have to be that way!" from unionization supporters. I have no doubt that they are correct - no union has to turn out that way. This possibility gives me little assurance.
Further, most of the time pitches come in the form of "Don't you care about privacy? Join the union and together we can!". Which often comes across as someone looking for tech money to fund their advocacy rather than genuinely trying to improve the working condititons of people in tech.
Potential hires were offered an employment contract with terms that included the settling certain disputes through arbitration. They accepted the offer and signed the contract. Now these people are not only are trying to nullify that clause, they’re adopting an air of moral superiority because they think that clause should never have existed.
Not only does this seem unsympathetic to me, it seems impractical. Why would you go work for a company that seemingly doesn’t share your values only to later take an activist stance to try and change said company?
At the risk of being cynical, my guess is that this is a PR stunt as much as it’s an employment negotiation. We the outside observers would be the pawns of this tactic that can produce public sentiment to influence Riot. That’s why I’m not so quick to categorize this as simply another contract negotiation.
No there's not, you just haven't bothered to read up on the issue.
Rioters wanted a toxic senior leader fired for well-documented lapses in judgement. Instead he was given 3 months off and re-hired when the dust settled. The employees personally impacted by this are unable to pursue legal recourse thanks to forced arbitration.
But even assuming your explanation is correct, it is incomplete. Why now? This guy has been with the company for a while. He is hardly the only bad actor at the company, so why does his case merit more focus? Have a confluence of factors reached a tipping point? Do employees feel secure enough about their status that they can make this move?
The employees are fighting this particular case of injustice because they care about doing so, and because you don't solve a big problem by doing nothing; you have to start somewhere! This is the start.
> But even assuming your explanation is correct, it is incomplete. Why now?
The offender was brought back on with no long term consequences for his behavior, and now 100+ people have found the courage to coordinate and walkout to express their disdain towards senior management that thought this was ok (to put a toxic individual back in with people that are uncomfortable around him). Do you think this shit gets organized in a few hours around the water cooler or at a single happy hour?
The group walking out clearly articulated their reasons, that's on you if you can't bother to read up on it.
> Do employees feel secure enough
There's the National Labor Relations Act, plus California protects against retaliation when speaking out against working conditions.
Because we are in a day and age where these efforts actually have a chance of success.
10 years ago, the vast majority of people would hold the same toxic attitudes that you hold, and the concerns would be dismissed.
But not anymore. Things are changing. And it is now possible to hold horrible people responsible for their illegal and immoral actions.
That part is the easy part to understand. The employer acted in a manner that made employees want to sue. They realized the fine print they hadn't read when joining the company gave away that right. What's happening now is about drawing attention to this so that future prospective employees elsewhere are aware of it and there's pressure on companies to stop requiring it.
That's the explicit point of protest, I don't understand why you'd characterize it as a PR stunt.
Or why you'd preface your statement with a dramatic disclaimer about cynicism that makes the thing you're portraying sound more sinister.
For instance, nobody admitted they didn’t read the fine print or objected at the time, or anything like that. In light of that, my story that “some employees had a change of heart about their contracts and took up activism” would be just as valid. You might not care about that distinction, but it puts the events in a slightly different light from the other explanation about “employees don’t have leverage when they were being hired”.
And yeah, your story would also make sense if this was a play about taking the power back over their own contracts. But considering that they are still striking over existing employee contracts would contradict your story.
Since I’m being downvoted anyway, fuck it. I think these employees are being duplicitous or at least misleading about their intentions. I think their activism has overridden any ideals they might have had about negotiating power. And I think “forced arbitration” is not worthy of moral condemnation. You are free to tell me all the ways those are terribly wrong ways to think.
I doubt the employees had ever given any thought to it, or were even aware of it, until they had a reason to look into lawsuits.
Arbitration is neither objectively worthy nor unworthy of moral condemnation. It's on them and on you to try to make your cases and influence opinion.
Like many things arbitration is probably fine in principle if treated by both parties in the spirit in which it was originally conceived. To simplify legal matters. But if it gets abused and used as a license to misbehave by one party then it should be rethought.
Maybe that's what happened here and maybe not, I don't know. But the positions and intentions seem straightforward.
Sure. Your way of thinking means that employees and execs can sexually harass people, and get away with it, without allowing the victim to achieve justice.
It allows companies to protect sexual harassers, all while being completely immune to the legal system, and making it extremely difficult for victims to hold companies responsible for protecting sexual harassers.
Personally, I'd rather live in a world where it was possible to sue companies for protecting sexual harassers, and for retaliating against victims, through our court system.
The whole point of our court system is to support the law. I don't like it when people's legal rights to justice are taken away from them, for the purpose of protecting sexual harassers.
Really, I don't see any possible gains for them here other than what they're explicitly asking for. What do you think this is really about?
Striking / walkouts have been a "legit" negotiating tactic pretty much since employment was invented.
There's nothing wrong with one side or the other asking for a negotiation or renegotiation in good faith. Contracts are not immutable, they get amended all the time for all sorts of reasons.
Choosing to withhold your labor until a renegotiation happens is an extreme tactic that is likely to generate bad faith from the other party long term, but it's always legal and always moral because our society considers slavery unacceptable.
Contracts are an important part of working conditions, as are workers perceptions of self-worth. If your contractual working conditions are demeaning such that you're prepared to not get paid and potentially risk being terminated in order to protest the demeaning conditions, no reasonable person would attempt to force you to work.
It is to the companies benefit in these cases that knowledgeable employees attempt to solve the problem rather than simply leaving. It is much cheaper to amend contracts than train new workers. This is a classic case where amending relevant contracts benefits everyone.
Is that does that help you straighten this out?
Like you point out, people could get potentially be fired for walking out. At that point, those employees have demonstrated that having this clause changed is worth potentially not having this job. If that’s the case, why didn’t they negotiate on that clause before they were hired? Same things at stake, same gambit, just more direct.
Furthermore, now that these employees are trying to renegotiate after having worked with such terms in place for a time, what prompted this change? Were they once accepting of such terms but changes their mind? Or did they not object when that clause was only in their own contract, but now that they see it in other peoples contracts they are inspired to make some company-wide change? The motivations are far from clear.
The other part of the above comment left unaddressed is the implicit demonstration of priorities seems strange. The games industry has plenty of turnover, burnout, and rough conditions. So when some people choose to work in the games industry, presumably out of passion, their opportunity cost is substantial. Meanwhile, Riot Games has had a history of bad/abusive behavior within the company. So what kind of person does it take to go work at Riot but later decide “this is the issue where I’m taking a stand.” If they cared that much about working some place they like, and Riot already has this history, it seems strange to later be indignant about their workplace.
One employee has much less bargaining power than 100, especially in the wildly asymmetric dynamic of the hiring process.
Are you going to lend them your time machine so they can go back and change mistakes they made in the past? If not, I guess all they can do about mistakes made in the past is take action here in the present.
People try to pre-empt the obvious response (in this case, "you are being uncharitable") with a basic retort ("I'm just trying to get this straight")